The Toyota Way has two main pillars: continuous improvement and respect for people. Respect is necessary to work with people. By “people” we mean employees, supply partners, and customers. … We don’t mean just the end customer; on the assembly line the person at the next workstation is also your customer. That leads to teamwork. If you adopt that principle, you’ll also keep analyzing what you do in order to see if you’re doing things perfectly, so you’re not troubling your customer. That nurtures your ability to identify problems, and if you closely observe things, it will lead to kaizen – continuous improvement. The root of the Toyota Way is to be dissatisfied with the status quo; you have to ask constantly, “Why are we doing this?”
––Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabe (from “Scaling Lean and Agile Development”)